The findings show either general stagnation or deterioration in all of the four major areas encompassed by the MPM: Basic protection, Market plurality, Political independence and Social inclusiveness. The MPM 2017 has also confirmed the findings of the previous four rounds of monitoring – showing that no country analysed is free from risks to media pluralism.

Journalists and other media actors are facing a series of threats and attacks (physical and digital) in several European countries.

Journalists’ working conditions are deteriorating, exposing journalists to external and undue pressures in their professional work in most of the countries examined.

Whistleblower protection is still weak across Europe.

Media ownership concentration remains one of the most significant risks to media pluralism and is seen as creating barriers to diversity of information and viewpoints.

News organisations continue to be vulnerable to political interference, especially when economic conditions are unstable.

A lack of political independence of public service media, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, remains a matter of concern.

Lack of gender equality in managerial and content creation roles in European media organisations represents one of the highest risk scores recorded by the Monitor.

Little or no progress has been registered with regard to media literacy across the EU.

The Media Pluralism Monitor (MPM) is a tool that has been developed by our Centre to assess the risks for media pluralism in a given country.

Prior to the 2017 implementation, the tool has been implemented in 2016 and tested under two pilot-projects co-funded by the European Union in 2014 and 2015. These two pilot-test implementations built on the prototype of the MPM that was designed in the 2009 Independent Study on Indicators for Media Pluralism in the Member States – Towards a Risk-Based Approach carried out by KU Leuven, JIBS, CEU, Ernst&Young, and a team of national experts (http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/media_taskforce/doc/pluralism/pfr_report.pdf).